Nothing But a Man

Director Michael Roemer

NOTHING BUT A MAN        A+                

USA  (95 mi) 1964  d:  Michael Roemer

One way for local whites to take the strut out of a black man's step was to put him in prison...Southerners who had just lost a war managed to convince courts to put hundreds of black men in prison, including black soldiers.          

—from the book Ain’t Nothing But a Man, by Scott Reynolds Nelson

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
—Martin Luther King Jr. from April 16, 1963, Letter from Birmingham Jail full text

I ain’t fit to live with no more. It’s just like a lynching. They don’t use a knife, but they got other ways.    —Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon)          

One of the better films that reveals what it means and how it feels to be black, reportedly Malcolm X’s favorite film, this is arguably the best black film ever made in America, set in Alabama’s Deep South in the early 60’s, though interestingly enough it was actually made by a white guy, Michael Roemer, born in Berlin, Germany, who fled the Holocaust as an 11-year old child on the Kindertransports, coming after his mother’s family shoe store was destroyed during Kristallnacht.  In the early 30’s Nazis organized boycotts of Jewish businesses in Germany, publically burned Jewish and non-German books in Berlin, established quotas for non-Aryans in schools, and excluded Jews from public parks and swimming pools, with the director remembering having to sit on separate yellow benches when Jews were denied entrance into movies theaters, circumstances eerily similar to blacks in the Jim Crow South, with white supremacy resembling Nazi racialization, especially in its impact on families.  Made on a $300,000 budget during the dawn of the Civil Rights era, the production coincided with the civil rights insurgency and benefited from input from activists, shot during the tumultuous summer of 1963 simultaneous to the Medgar Evers’ assassination, George Wallace preaching “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” while standing in the doorway blocking the entrance of two black students at the University of Alabama, the March on Washington, the site of Martin Luther King’s infamous “I Had A Dream” speech, and they were still filming the day four young girls were killed by bombs at the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham.  Both Roemer and his co-writer and cinematographer Robert M. Young were Jewish, educated at Harvard University, and wrote the script after traveling through the South together, with Roemer directing the black-and-white film using a neorealist style, giving it a near documentary look.  What distinguishes the film is the remarkable ease in telling the story without a hint of condescension or manipulation, no preaching, no moral crusading, no underlying political message, and never resorting to caricature or exaggeration for added emphasis.  Instead it just tells it like it is.  Never once do we hear music swelling to emphasize a poignant moment and the end credits play without a sound.  There’s not a false step anywhere in this landmark picture, beautifully directed with an assured, understated style that reeks of authenticity and serves as a time capsule that holds up unusually well even after 50 years.  With no sympathetic white figures in the film, it was misunderstood and undervalued by white critics, largely ignored at the box office, with viewers finding it underwhelming, but the film was years ahead of its time, with Ebony magazine listing the film among their Top Ten Black Films of All Time in a 1995 poll, revealing essential truths about being black that other films ignored, effortlessly conveying a poetic depiction of everyday black realities, a predecessor to small black independent films like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1979) and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), which received greater acclaim, largely due to their accessibility, part of an academically studied movement, the LA Rebellion, catalog (pdf), while this harder-to-find film has continually been relegated to the obscure.  Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson gives one of the great unheralded performances in American film, smart, proud, a sexy swagger to his step, extremely dignified, never overreaching, usually calm and quiet, a strong, silent type, but his life is a neverending series of exasperating events, continually referred to as “boy” and “trouble” while being goaded into unwelcome confrontations from racist taunts where he refuses to buckle under the patronizing humiliation of ignorant whites who expect him to “act the nigger” and play the subservient game of bowing down to white authority, as that’s what’s always been expected in this neck of the woods. 

It ain’t pretty, but it’s real, where the film does an excellent job laying a foundation of his well respected and confident demeanor working and joking among fellow black men as a nomadic railroad worker, making good money, a loner out on his own not beholden to anybody.  But when he falls for a preacher’s daughter at a church social outside Birmingham, Alabama, Josie (jazz singer Abbey Lincoln), a proud and irresistibly beautiful woman, their romance is accompanied by a backdrop of contemporary Motown songs playing on a jukebox or the radio, like Martha and the Vandella’s “Heat Wave” Martha & the Vandellas - (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave YouTube (2:43) or Little Stevie Wonder - Fingertips. (Part 2) - YouTube (3:13), adding an overall sense of upbeat optimism, like seeing the couple develop an interest in one another dancing on a crowded dance floor, which predates the use of culturally relevant rock music in movies like Easy Rider (1969) or early Scorsese movies like Mean Streets (1973).  When they decide to get married, there’s little fanfare, as her father (Stanley Greene) is openly suspicious of a man who never went to college and doesn’t go to church, believing that his daughter deserves better.  But they’re happy in an easy going kind of way, despite the objections of her father, developing a low key relationship not usually shown in motion pictures, with a distinct class difference, as she grew up in a middle class background and teaches elementary school, having gone to college.  But their marriage suffers as he experiences a series of job setbacks where he’s forced to endure local insults, always being labeled a troublemaker for refusing to shuffle and jive for the white man, losing one job after another which puts them in desperate straits financially.  Usually he’d just hit the road, but now he’s part of a marriage.  Each time he runs off, he comes face to face with his seldom seen father (Julius Harris) who abandoned him at a young age, a bitter, broken down alcoholic who has nothing but rage against the world around him, unfortunately maimed by an industrial accident, no longer able to work, who would probably be dead were it not for the care of the strong woman beside him, Lee (Gloria Foster), continually railing against his own son as well, telling him to “get lost.”  He also visits a little 4-year old boy born out of wedlock, whose mother has taken off and left the child behind with another woman, viewing his father with that sad, fearful look of distrust.  Yet when he’s angry, he denies that’s even his child, but he nonetheless sends money regularly.  Interesting that Josie’s father gives Duff a word of advice, suggesting he “act the part,” calling it a form of psychology to “make ‘em think you’re going along and get what you want.”  Duff has a few words of his own for the preacher, “You’ve been stooping so long, Reverend, you don't know how to stand straight.  You’re just half a man.”  Like De Niro in a Scorsese film, Duff’s refusal to compromise his pride is what distinguishes his character, and his strong sense of self-respect is precisely what Josie finds so remarkably attractive about him, though he’s tested to the limits, behaving atrociously at times when his back is against the wall, undermined by generations of black passive indifference to the demeaning arrogance of white supremacy that has ruled since slavery days, exploiting black work aspirations and destroying family lives, refusing any suggestions of blacks aligning together, as that means losing their livelihood, leaving him singled out and isolated, placed on a do not hire blacklist around town for similar jobs, Nothing But a Man YouTube (2:32). 

Despite the bleak and unforgiving landscape for blacks in the Jim Crow South, described in great detail by American novelists William Faulkner and Richard Wright, or adapted movie novels like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), blacks remained subject to white-controlled work places in town, along with a constant reminder that a lynching occurred in town eight years ago, perhaps a reference to the horrific 1955 murder of Emmett Till in nearby Mississippi, yet what’s ultimately so revealing is the discovery that Duff is living in a world that belongs to others, who set the rules and conditions, and define the allowable parameters of his existence.  This has never been so plainly and so sensitively revealed, as it defines black existence in America then and now, continually living under the thumb of white majority rule.  The film doesn’t so much tell a story as let one unravel before our eyes, conveyed with understatement, accenting naturalism and authenticity, though mostly shot on location in New Jersey, yet the images of low-down bars, streets and houses overrun by children, and rows of dilapidated tenements represent Birmingham’s poor black district, while the opening montage of a railroad section gang laying tracks was filmed during their earlier travels through the South.  Special recognition must be paid for the attention to black faces in the many close-ups, producing a depth and intimacy of images rarely seen before in filming black characters, where much of the underlying power of the film comes from the brilliant performances that allow viewers to immerse themselves in the predominately black cultural themes, like juke joints and church (featuring a brilliant gospel solo by Dorothy Hall), men getting blacklisted for standing up for themselves, where the only work available for blacks is back-breakingly hard labor that physically wears people out, where if they get injured or old, they’re of no use to anyone anymore, including themselves.  Without a job, forced to wallow in their worthlessness and self-loathing, their lives consist of sitting on their front stoops doing nothing, wasted in the mind-numbing void of alcohol abuse, where the only places blacks are allowed to live are dilapidated neighborhoods, where neglected children are the product of so many uncaring or absent fathers that a sense of worthlessness becomes synonymous with their deplorable living conditions, producing a righteous anger that eventually comes to define them.  This cycle of generational dysfunction hits Duff in the face like a ton of bricks, and he’s determined not to let it happen to him, where he chooses to be different, to be a responsible man, refusing to defer to white men, even at the cost of a job.  The film reflects the obstacles he faces, the anger, the indignation, the wretched helplessness he feels as he attempts to wade through the minefield of daily disasters waiting for him.  But never does he feel sorry for himself, or give up hope, but he does feel the sting of rebuke.  Their marriage is no picnic either and there are some rocky moments, but perhaps most significantly, this film offers no easy solutions.  Yet the profound depth of character is strikingly lucid, casting a harsh light on those blacks who do abandon their families, only making things that much more difficult for those they leave behind, perhaps removing the only hope they have, which weakens the already fragile state of broken black families and community.  Offering a dissertation on black masculinity, the film impressively reveals an inherent capacity for love while enduring endless racial threats, while also highlighting the significance and stability of female support, both emotionally and financially, becoming a brilliant depiction of a troubled life mirroring the upheaval of social change during the Civil Rights era, with details specific to the story’s time and place, which remain universally impactful, with the film being selected to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1993.          

Alien

ALIEN             A                    

USA  Great Britain  (116 mi)  1979  ‘Scope  d:  Ridley Scott      

In space, no one can hear you scream

Ridley Scott’s warm-up for his real masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982), that would come several years later, including similar uses of robots or replicants as well as the infamous rain sequences.  Each deal with the idea of technology run wild, while ALIEN has an extremely subversive view of corporate corruption and deceit, particularly the idea of lying to employees in order to protect top secret military aims, where the lives of employees in outer space are literally owned by the corporation, requiring each to sign a contract to that effect, alleviating the company of all liability in the event something disastrous occurs.  Therein lies the cold-hearted, underlying premise to this story, where reality isn’t what you think it is, as it’s disguised under the lies of an alternative space mission, where only the top officers are aware of the circumstances, so some of the shudders in this film is the degree to which corporate greed is emphasized—very much ahead of its time in that respect.  With several nods to Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), certainly at the center of this premise is a ship computer, known as mother, that no one has access to except the top officers.  The rest are excluded from the chain of command and thereby shielded from the truth of their real mission.  This story concerns an outer space cargo ship that is returning home from a mining expedition, where its passengers are in a scientifically imposed deep sleep, but woken up 10 months before their anticipated arrival time to answer a distress signal on an isolated asteroid where they encounter an alien life form that horrifically makes its way inside their space vessel, eventually picking off the crew one by one.  The pervasive sense of dread turns this into a haunted house story with a monster on the loose, as in no time this crew is lost in the woods with no way out.  

Adapted from a Dan O’Bannon story, who previously wrote the story and screenplay for John Carpenter’s DARK STAR (1974), assisted by Ronald Shusett, with amazing visual effects from H.R. Giger (surrealist alien creator), Carlo Rambaldi (alien head design), Brian Johnson and Nick Allder (special effects), and Denys Ayling (miniature photography), with an extremely elaborate and intricately created set design by Michael Seymour (production design), Leslie Dilley and Roger Christian (art), and Ian Whittaker (set).  From the outset, the camera is the only stirring creature as it slowly moves around corners and gazes at the dark cavernous design of the space ship interior, taking on the attributes of inquisitiveness and curiosity.  When the humans awake to discover their situation, all done by computer (perhaps the most archaic presence in the entire film), there’s an interesting use of improvisation in their conversation, using the Altman style of overlapping dialogue which creates a sense of authenticity in the moment, where soon each of the characters begins to take shape in the eyes of the audience.  The corporate hierarchy (and great cast) is immediately established, where the chief mechanics, the two guys that fix things and make the ship go are on the lowest pay grade (Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton as Parker and Brett), while Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright are Ripley and Lambert, the middle management officers under John Hurt (Kane), commanded by chief science officer Ian Holm (Ash), and ship commander Tom Skerritt (Dallas).  For openers, the engineers complain they’re not getting equal shares of the bonus pay for the work they’re doing, while in no time, Ash reminds them of a hidden clause in their contract that if they fail to carry out their mission, as assigned, they will forfeit all wages.  So immediately they are put in their place by the ship foremen, where life in outer space resembles the same working conditions on earth of an overworked and underpaid work force.  But that similarity ends as soon as they explore the asteroid, where with shuddering efficiency, there is a stunning violation of standard protocol as they allow the alien to enter their ship. 

What immediately becomes noticeable is the lazy nonchalance in the way this is handled, and the lack of precaution used.  Anyone with a pet dog or cat, or even a bird, knows the care one uses to keep them from escaping out of the house—by closing the windows and doors behind you.  This crew routinely leaves doors open allowing the alien free access to their entire ship.  And despite the obvious danger to all, when they have it in their possession, no one is assigned to watch it.  So they display a rather casual display of ignorance in their approach to this alien intrusion, all of which takes on even greater significance when the alien grows to monstrous size and slowly starts attacking the crew.  The monster itself, whose appearance is delayed and only gradually seen until the end, is a marvel of grotesque proportion, yet what we remember is the gooey slime it leaves behind and the continually drooling giant teeth, where it stealthily moves mysteriously overhead through the ventilation ducts.  Despite the passage of thirty years, the film still holds up because Scott does an exquisite job conveying a creepy sense of panic and fear and things that go bump in the night, even while most of the horrific violence takes place offscreen, where the body count, quicker edits and dark claustrophobic interior adds to an increasingly developing paranoia on the ship.  The pulsating strobe lights and emergency siren sound loop become almost unbearable as the film races to its spectacular heavy breathing finale, which is an interesting mixture of frantic desperation, matching Weaver’s sensuous vulnerability and cool head against a ghastly beast that obviously uses and consumes humans at will.  In the director’s cut, the added scenes are a nasty confrontation between Lambert and Ripley outside the infirmary, a brief shot of the alien hanging like one of the chains hanging from the ceiling above Brett in the interior rain (from condensation) as he’s looking for the cat, Parker gets Brett’s blood splattered on him as Brett is carried off, and the infamous ‘cocooning’ sequence where humans become stored fuel for the monster.  Along with his next film Blade Runner, Scott has created two of the best sci-fi films ever made and could never have made that film without the meticulous precision shown here working with such extraordinary special effects, creating one of the great monster movies ever, certainly better than all the follow ups which resemble the CGI assault to the senses shown today, a blitzkrieg of explosions and mayhem which the audience substitutes for excitement.  The thrill of ALIEN is largely due to the deliberate pacing and stunning futuristic visual innovation of the time which precedes the CGI revolution in cinema, where the director himself had to know how, from the wordless opening restraint, he could use the audience’s natural fear of the unknown along with a pervading sense of gloom to help build the mounting tension to a peak of madness and hysteria, all the while embracing the fundamental essence of what it is to be human.